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The East Anglia Climate Snatch – Not (Yet) a ‘Crime’

By Andrew C. Revkin March 1, 2011 1:06 pmMarch 1, 2011 1:06 pm

David Roberts at Grist has posted a deconstruct of the machinations of professional climate deniers, the failures of the press and the staining of climate scientists’ reputations in the wake of “Climategate.” There’s plenty worth exploring in his analysis, but one specific point needs to be rebutted right off the bat — his contention that the media, including yours truly, were wrong not to call a crime a crime.

None of those phrasings are wrong, per se, but all pass rather lightly over the fact that some actual person or persons put them on the internet, made them public, extracted them from the computers. Someone hacked in, collected emails, sifted through and selected those that could be most damning, organized them, and timed the release for maximum impact, just before the Copenhagen climate talks. Said person or persons remain uncaught, uncharged, and unprosecuted. There have since been attempted break-ins at other climate research institutions.

There’s one problem with this argument. No one in authority has yet concluded that the incident was in fact a crime.

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Roberts’ dark scenario above is entirely plausible, but hardly the only possibility. Some analysts see the contents of the files as reflecting the results of an internal collation of material under requests made through Britain’s Freedom of Information laws. (In fact, the only conclusion related to criminality so far from British officials was that the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit had breached that law in the way it handled some information requests.)

The reason I use “unauthorized distribution” and other such terms to describe the fate of the e-mails and files is that British authorities still, after well over a year, have not called the incident a “crime.” Nor is there firm evidence of a “hack,” in the sense of proof that the folders of material from the climate research center were snatched by someone from outside the university. (Mind you, it’s been hard to find appropriate shorthand for the incident that skips the word hack, which was even in the headline of my initial news article.)

Nature understands that evidence has emerged effectively ruling out a leak from inside the [Climatic Research Unit], as some have claimed. And other climate-research organizations are believed to have told police that their systems survived hack attempts at the same time.

Sorry, but “are believed to have told police” is not a standard I see as sufficient to justify jumping firmly to the crime conclusion.

Setting aside the East Anglia incident, one might note that, well, there was a clear “hack” in the intrusion at Realclimate.org in the United States, where someone planted the same folders and prepared a faux post, as described in detail by Gavin Schmidt, one of the founders of that climate blog (and which was reported by me and others at the very start of this saga).

But even there, the situation is not so simple — in part because no one involved in Realclimate.org filed a complaint with the police.

I asked Schmidt whether a criminal investigation was ever conducted into the Real Climate hack. Here’s his reply:

“It would have been up to us to report it, and I didn’t think it was worth it – If you recall, we were kind of busy. ;)”

I think it’s unfortunate that the Real Climate team did not press this case if the law in the United States is as clear-cut as Schmidt asserted. But, in his defense, he clearly did have vast challenges on his plate then…

I still think it’s unfortunate that a complaint wasn’t filed. Perhaps it might have led to an investigation that could have pulled back the curtain a bit on the chain of events leading back to that moment in 2009 when someone hit the “copy” key.

In the end, the initial incident, for all the resulting insinuation and attacks, remains just that — an incident.

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By 2050 or so, the human population is expected to pass nine billion. Those billions will be seeking food, water and other resources on a planet where humans are already shaping climate and the web of life. Dot Earth was created by Andrew Revkin in October 2007 -- in part with support from a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship -- to explore ways to balance human needs and the planet's limits.